Tag Archives: comps

Q: What happens when you start out listing your home at a low price to entice buyers and the first offer is full price but no other offers come in? Are you stuck selling at the lower price (at which you never actually intended to sell)?

A: With multiple offers on the comeback, many savvy sellers are pricing their homes on the low end with the intention to drive buyer interest and — fingers crossed — generate multiple offers. In markets where rising buyer activity and home values have already begun to decrease the inventory of available homes for sale, this strategy has been very effective. However, there is always the risk of precisely the problem you pose: What happens if you get only a single offer at the asking price?

Here are several pieces of advice for sellers who are worried about what happens when listing low doesn’t result in multiple offers:

1. Consider what the offer you get does and does not mean. You are never obligated to sell your home at a price you don’t want to, no matter how close the offer is to what you are asking for the property. I’ve actually seen a couple of situations in which sellers get a single full-price offer and reject it or issue a counteroffer, sometimes because they are in the situation you describe, and other times because it has come to their attention that they owe more on the home than they expected. (Don’t plan on doing this, though; it is a strategy with a high likelihood for disgusting a buyer and turning them all the way off.)

The reality is that, if you get only one offer at a given price, that may truly be the fair market value of your home even if you think you might have gotten a higher offer for the property had you asked for more. To live in that world of “what might have happened if” is to torture yourself with the impossibility of guessing at what a hypothetical situation would have turned out like. The real deal is that if you had asked for more, it’s possible you would have gotten more. It’s equally possible that the one buyer who did make an offer would never even have come to see the property.

2. Understand your listing agreement before you list it low. Under some listing agreements (your contract with the agent who lists your home for sale), a full-price, cash offer with no contingencies may obligate you to pay a commission even if “full price” is the discount price you set in an effort to get multiple offers. You can negotiate to change the default terms of your listing agreement, though, so that you are obligated to only pay a commission on a transaction that actually closes. You would need to do this before signing the agreement, and before the home goes on the market.

Get some legal advice from a local attorney if you don’t feel you completely understand the terms and implications of your listing agreement before you sign it and before you set the list price of your home.

3. Don’t list your home at a price you’d be upset to receive for it. The savvy sellers who list their homes on the low end to generate multiple offers are not listing their properties hundreds of thousands of dollars below their fair market value, or even making them the lowest-priced home in the neighborhood. Smart, aggressive pricing is listing a home at what seems like the low end of the range of comparable-supported prices or a slight discount from that — about a 2-5 percent discount, not 40 or 50, or 70 percent.

Many sellers are OK with taking the risk that their home might sell at 2 percent below the comparables as a trade-off for the opportunity to generate multiple offers and the possibility of receiving a premium sale price. And if you are a seller considering listing low, you should be aware of the potential trade-offs, and should make that decision only if you have market data to support the fact that this strategy makes sense in your local market.

To be crystal clear, as a seller, you should not list your home at a price you would be upset about receiving or unwilling to accept.

And remember that “listing it low” is a strategy that has proven to be successful for people specifically aiming to generate multiple offers in the many markets that currently support multiple offers. If your objective is simply to sell your home — period — in a down market, for example, then this may not be the route for you to take.

Every market is different, and every home and seller is different. If your market is still very soft or you don’t see any multiple offers happening in your town, you may not be able to generate loads of offers no matter what you price your home at. As always, work with your agent and take a long hard look at your local market dynamics before deciding on a pricing strategy.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is an author and the Consumer Ambassador and Educator for real estate listings search site Trulia.com.

If you’re shopping for a home with a bargain-basement price, a short sale could be the answer.

This is where a lender allows borrowers who can’t keep up with the mortgage payments to sell their homefor less than they owe on the property. The bank or mortgage company takes whatever you pay to purchasethe home and forgives the remaining debt.How low can you go and still expect a lender to approve the deal?

Lenders usually will accept offers that net at least 82% (after expenses) of the home’s current fair market value, regardless of what the borrower owes, says Tim Harris, co-founder of Harris Real Estate University in Las Vegas.

Why would a lender do that?

Because it will lose less by allowing a short sale than by going through a foreclosure.

Taking advantage of a short sale is less risky than buying a foreclosure, because so many repossessed homes need tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs. The worst of the bunch have been deliberately vandalized by angry owners just before they were evicted.

Here are 4 smart moves for buying a short sale property:

Smart move 1. Make sure you’re a good candidate for a short sale.

Short sales are all about presenting the lender with a deal it can’t refuse. Banks and mortgage servicingcompanies are most likely to approve buyers that:

• Have a substantial down payment.

• Have been preapproved for a mortgage.

• Place no contingencies on their contract, such as having to sell their current home beforeproceeding with the purchase.

You need to know whether the home has been aggressively marketed — the bank won’t like it if the seller hasn’t made a good-faith effort to get a reasonable bid — and whether the bank has received a broker’s price opinion, which it will use to determine the home’s market value.

Smart move 3. Offer the right price.

Short sales aren’t the time or place to do a lot of dickering.

Lenders don’t have the time or staff to evaluate an endless bunch of bids, each a little higher than the last. If you deliberately lowball a bank or mortgage company, it will just write you off as a waste of time.

You need to come up with a cheap but reasonable offer, which the bank or mortgage company will accept, in one try.

Start by estimating the fair market value of the home for yourself, using comps (values of comparable properties that have sold near the home in the past few months).

Take the condition of the home into account and reduce your estimate if the home needs repairs. It’s a buyer’s market, and you don’t have to treat a fixer-upper like it’s in pristine condition.

Calculate 82% of the home’s value, throw in a few thousand dollars to cover the lender’s cost of doing a short sale (ask your agent what that typically is for your area), and you have a good starting point.

Now look at the quality of your comps.

If they’re straightforward deals, and the homes spent at least three or four months on the market, then you’re good to go.

But if all of the comps are foreclosures that sold within a few weeks of hitting the market, you’ve got to assume those were damaged homes being dumped at fire sale prices.

You’ll have to adjust your offer upward, perhaps all the way to the full fair market value calculated with those comps.

Check how close your offer is to the asking price on the home. Remember, the sellers won’t get any of the money, so they have no incentive to demand an unreasonable price.

They’re just trying to find a price you’ll pay, and the bank will accept, to relieve them of their debt.

If you’re close, then you’ve probably come to the same conclusions as the sellers and their real estateagent.

If not, then your agent needs to have another talk with their agent to find out why.

Smart move 4. Be patient.

It almost always takes longer to close a short sale, because it takes so long for lenders to review and acceptyour proposal.

We’ve heard of deals closing in as little as five weeks when the lender has preapproved the short sale and asking price and you agree to meet that price.

But that rarely happens.

Most sellers don’t seek the lender’s approval for a short sale until they have a signed purchase contract in hand. (Here’s a step-by-step look at what sellers must do to complete a short sale.)

More often than not, it takes two to four months to get a “yes” or “no” from the bank or mortgage servicing company.

Although lenders say they’re trying to process these requests more quickly, there still aren’t enough loss mitigation specialists to deal with the rising demand for short sales, and we’re not seeing a big improvement.

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